Warrant and religious belief › The Aquinas/Calvin model

Plantinga names his initial proposal the Aquinas/Calvin model. It concerns belief in God and draws on the idea of a sensus divinitatis, a disposition or capacity through which circumstances can elicit awareness of God. The Latin expression means a sense of divinity. It belongs to the model's account of religious cognition, rather than naming an experimentally established organ.

On this proposal, contemplation of the world, gratitude, guilt, or danger can occasion theistic beliefs. The circumstances need not function as premises from which the believer infers God. Plantinga explicitly distinguishes seeing the night sky and forming a belief about God from constructing an argument that a grand sky must have a divine maker.

That distinction helps explain the opening comparison. Someone's response to the sky could be immediate without therefore being a poor version of a design argument. But calling it immediate still does not settle whether it has warrant. On Plantinga's account, that depends on the relevant capacity's existence and operation under the conditions of warrant.

The model also includes the effects of sin on cognition. Plantinga proposes that our relation to God can involve intellectual and affective disorder. This is a theological component of the account. It should not be turned into a diagnosis that a particular atheist is mentally ill, dishonest, or incapable of good reasoning.

A critic can ask whether appealing to sin explains disagreement or protects the model against criticism. A defender must address the model's credibility and coherence. Merely redescribing dissent as malfunction supplies no independent reason for a critic who rejects the model's theological premises to accept them. The conditional nature of the proposal remains relevant at precisely this point.